The Dream Team (film)
| The Dream Team | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Howard Zieff |
| Produced by | Christopher W. Knight |
| Written by | Jon Connolly David Loucka |
| Starring | |
| Music by | David McHugh |
| Cinematography | Adam Holender |
| Edited by | Carroll Timothy O'Meara |
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Production
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| Distributed by | Universal Pictures |
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Release date
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Running time
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113 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $15 million |
| Box office | $28,890,240 (USA) |
The Dream Team is a 1989 comedy film directed by Howard Zieff and produced by Christopher W. Knight for Imagine Entertainment and Universal Pictures. It stars Michael Keaton, Christopher Lloyd, Peter Boyle and Stephen Furst as mental-hospital inpatients who are left unsupervised in New York City during a field trip gone awry. Jon Connolly and David Loucka wrote the screenplay.
Dr. Jeff Weitzman (Dennis Boutsikaris) is a psychologist working in a sanitarium in New Jersey. His primary patients are Billy, Henry, Jack and Albert. Billy (Keaton) is the most normal of the group and their unofficial leader, though he is a pathological liar with delusions of grandeur and violent tendencies. Henry (Lloyd) is obsessive/compulsive and he has deluded himself into thinking he is one of the doctors at the hospital, often walking around with a clipboard, lab coat and stethoscope. Jack (Boyle) is a former advertising executive who believes he is Jesus Christ. Finally, Albert (Furst) is a man-child who only says things he hears during baseball games, particularly from former ball player and commentator Phil Rizzuto.
Convinced that his patients need some fresh air and some time away from the sanitarium, Dr. Weitzman persuades the administration to allow him to take them to a baseball game at Yankee Stadium. Unfortunately, he accidentally encounters two crooked cops just as they murder another officer. The doctor then gets knocked unconscious trying to get away and is put in the hospital. The group is now stranded in New York City, forced to cope with a place which is often more bizarre than their sanitarium. One of the both comic and serious plot twists is that the inmates have to listen to Albert's baseball jargon in order to get clues as to what happened to Dr. Weitzman, because he is the only one who witnessed it (he is just afraid to say it because of his catatonic condition). Two other running gags throughout the film are: Henry's threats to report psychologically disturbing behavior of the other patients (never realizing his own problems until near the end); and Billy's violent, unpredictable but ultimately harmless behavior in several different scenarios. A lesser gag is Jack, in his persona as Jesus Christ, causing a rousing sermon at a black church, only for the parishioners to come to their senses and expel him (without any clothes), and the other three patients get Jack new (albeit garish) clothes from an army surplus store.
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